Daria shook her head. “We haven’t seen him for six years. He left us one day. We were fighting a lot. It’s so much responsibility raising a child, and he’s a musician, which meant there was never any money. We got postcards from him a few times from big cities back East. Just short notes saying he hoped we were okay. That he missed us. He sent cash a few times. That was a little weird because the money always came when we were most desperate. I wondered . . .”
“What?”
“Oh, if maybe he was keeping an eye on us somehow. It creeped me out. But that really doesn’t make sense. He had no reason to stay away from Nikki, even if he was mad at me. Anyway, after a couple of years, I guess he got tired of the game. We didn’t hear anymore. I got over it and got a divorce. We had to put a notice in the paper. He never even called about that. I wonder if he knows.”
“And Nikki?”
“Nikki still thinks about him quite a bit. You only have one father.”
“Where is he?”
“Who knows?”
“Is there anyone else we should notify?”
“Nope,” Daria said. “I’ve had several guys hanging around since Nikki’s dad left, but none that lasted very long and none that hit it off with Nikki. I don’t know what it is about me but I sure don’t bring out the best in men. Nikki says I’d trust Satan if he had a nickel in his pocket and a good singing voice.”
“I’m assuming you want me to represent your daughter in this matter?”
“Yes! I thought that was obvious! Will you?”
Nina sensed the tension in Bob’s shoulders as she watched the eight ball heading for the pocket in her mind. Did she want to represent a teenaged girl accused of killing her uncle?
Looking into Daria Zack’s red-rimmed eyes, Nina felt the tug of her desperation. She was war-torn, a single mother like Nina with a teenaged child, struggling just to get by. If what her eyes told her and Bob had said was true, Daria Zack had a lot of trouble taking care of simple, everyday needs in the best of times. Faced with this, of course she felt desperate. And Nina could help her.
As for the case, she didn’t have enough information to judge it on its merits, but she knew one thing. It had fantastic elements she couldn’t even begin to enumerate, the most profound being that teenaged girls did not make a practice of attacking people with swords.
And there was the plane crash. Apparently, the son had died the same night as his father, although miles away and under utterly different circumstances. Could the two deaths be connected? The idea made her shiver. Here she was being offered a chance to make sense out of events that made no sense, bring some order into the chaos of death and accusations. She couldn’t bring her husband back, couldn’t create meaning where there was none, but she might be able to do something useful for this girl.
“I may be able help you,” she said, intentionally tamping down the strange excitement she was feeling at the prospect, “but we’ll need to talk some more.” There were money issues. She could not afford to take a murder case
pro bono.
“I’ll talk with Nicole before the detention hearing that’s scheduled tomorrow, and make a special appearance on her behalf. If I don’t end up representing her, at least she’ll have counsel tomorrow.” She got up, trying to look half as graceful as Daria. “I promise I will see you there.”
“But can’t you get her out now?”
“There’s a process involved. She’s stuck for tonight, but I’ll call Juvenile Hall and make sure everything’s okay over there. She’ll be all right until we can straighten things out.”
“I just knew you were going to fix everything,” said Daria valiantly, struggling to hide her disappointment at the news. “In this kind of situation I’m worthless. We’re so lucky to have someone as smart as you on our side!”
“One last thing,” Nina said from the doorway. Bob had already run out to the Bronco to let Hitchcock out and was throwing a stick for him in the yard. “Bob mentioned that the police questioned Nicole after they read her her rights. Did she tell them anything?”
Daria’s eyes seemed to search the room for an answer. “Bob had the balls and presence of mind to remind her she had a right to remain silent, which is more than I could do with all those uniforms and shiny badges flashing around the room like they owned it.”
Nina felt a little like a cowboy rounding up a bunch of wayward cattle, trying to keep Daria on track. “Did she admit something?”
“Thank God, my poor baby had the smarts not to confess or anything. But—it’s bad. There’s a witness. Someone told the police they saw her there that night.”
CHAPTER 3
JUST BEFORE NOON, Nina finished her Superior Court appearances in Tahoe and drove down the mountain to see Nicole Zack. The thicker air hit as she descended the first few thousand feet and its rich earthy smells, along with the lushness of an aquamarine sky and the stretch of dry open road, tinged a cheerful pink in the spring sunshine, intoxicated her.
It took an ugly tangle of traffic to bring her mood back down to earth. She edged into a spot on the street, and walked a block to the center.
The Juvenile Detention Center in Placerville was not the horror story of B movies, but it wasn’t Grandma’s kitchen either. The kids milling around acted like a group of high schoolers passing in the halls between classes, joking and nudging each other. Even the security people seemed easygoing. Not for the first time, Nina reflected on how the most desperate situation carried on long enough devolves into banality.
On the TV in the day room, a blond character on a soap opera confessed tearfully to pregnancy and a married lover. From a scratchy tweed couch in the corner, two girls stared at the screen, entranced. High windows allowed a thin daylight inside. A scatter of bent aluminum chairs completed the dreary picture.
Nicole came in from the hall, and Nina got up.
“Hi, Nicole. You got my message?”
“Hi. They gave it to me this morning.”
The girl sat down, back straight, feet flat on the floor, chin out. She was very slender, very pale, tiny and young-looking for sixteen. She wore black jeans and a black T-shirt with a chaotic and unreadable logo on it. Wispy brown hair hung so that it covered a lot of her face. Nina saw a glimmer of Daria’s physical grace in the way Nikki languidly moved her hand, pushing hair behind one ear. She studied the girl to see what Bob found pretty about the angular little face, finally deciding it must be the heavily fringed, willful brown eyes, now focused intently on Nina, at the moment glowing almost gold with not-very-well-suppressed anger. “How are they treating you here?” she asked.
“Okay.”
“Has your mother been able to see you yet?”
“She came this morning,” she said. “So you’re Bob’s mom. I would have known right away. He looks a lot like you, except his hair’s so much darker.”
“Bob said to say hi.”
“Uh huh. Say hi back.”
Nina took a breath. The girl stared at the floor. She didn’t seem to have the insistent urge to talk that so often afflicts the newly incarcerated.
“Would you like me to call you Nikki? Is that your nickname?”
“Whatever.”
“Well, Nikki, your mother wants to hire me to defend you. I’ll be talking to her further about that this afternoon. Meanwhile, I want to know from you what you said to the police when they came to your house.”
“You’re younger than I thought you would be. You look like you could still be in school.” She examined Nina as a botany student might inspect an unknown specimen. “Did Bob make you come over here?”
“Your mother asked me to come.”
“No, she didn’t. Bob made you come. Daria can’t tell her ass from her earhole. She’d cry, then maybe have a beer or two, then call up her friends and everybody would get all worked up trying to figure out what to do about me being in jail. Then, later, after I’m convicted, years later, they’d figure out how I needed a lawyer.” She laughed.
“Bob asked me to come, too. The first thing you need to know is, I’m not going to lie to you.”
“Of course not! It’s a known fact lawyers never lie.”
Nina had seen that coming. Something about this girl, her attitude, felt so familiar. She smiled.
The tense edges of Nikki’s lips eased, returning the ghost of a smile.
“Now tell me what happened last night.”
“Well, first thing that happened was they knocked on the door. Bob and I were in the kitchen making out.” She squinted for a reaction. Looking a little disappointed at finding none, she continued. “Ha ha. Joke. Actually, we were eating a snack. Daria was in the living room doing the boob dance thing she does. Trying to make her boobs go in different directions. She does that when she can’t remember the steps she’s supposed to be learning . . .”
“You call your mother Daria? Why?”
“She’s not much of a mother,” said Nicole. “So, to continue what I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted . . . these cops bang on the front door. Daria answers and uh oh, dumb move number thirteen hundred and six for that day, she invites them in! Or at least they do that cop thing of coming in before you have a chance to think, and they started looking around at the hovel. She should have known better, but when you get to know her you will recognize the vast extent of her cluelessness.
“Me and Bob go into the living room to see what’s going on. They’re telling Daria about Uncle Bill, how some slasher wasted him. They go into all the blood spattered around, etcetera.” The timbre of her voice changed imperceptibly. “They ask her things . . . God, she’s so dumb. My theory is that she had me so young it arrested the natural development of her brain cells.”
“What did your mother say?”
“Oh, Bill was such a fabulous guy! So good to us and to Aunt Beth.” She was a good mimic. Nina could hear Daria in her voice. “A buncha crap, that’s what.”
“She lied?”
“If you gave her a lie detector test she would pass! You would think somewhere inside she’s got to remember what a bastard he was but you’d be wrong.”
“Did you say anything?”
“Not much. They started in on her, like she might know something, which of course, she didn’t. She was getting really upset, crying. What did they expect!”
“Go on.”
“Then they started on me. One of them took the other aside and showed him a report or something. They looked at me and then looked back at the report, like they were comparing me to some description they had. That’s when the woman asked me where I was that night. I said I was here, at home.
“Then they said a neighbor saw me at Uncle Bill’s that night, so I might as well admit it, otherwise I’d be perjuring myself and obstructing a police investigation, and they’d arrest me. And I got confused at that point, I admit it. I was afraid . . .” The chin jutted up into the air, as firm and stubborn as her mother’s. “I was thinking they might arrest me if I didn’t admit it, but Bob jumped in and told me to shut up, so I did. They went and arrested me anyhow. It’s a miracle I didn’t tell them. They were asking fast and standing close and they wore these uniforms with big guns in holsters and . . .”
“I know how it is,” Nina said.
“Good band name,” Nikki said. “Big Guns in Holsters.”
“Did they—did you feel they were pressuring you?”
“Of course they were fuckin’ pressuring me. You did say you were a lawyer, didn’t you?”
“Let’s get something straight, Nikki,” Nina said. “You may get away talking like this to a lot of people, maybe even your mother, but you can’t get away with talking like that to me. If you don’t straighten up and act civil, I leave. Do you want me to leave?”
“No.” A little voice. Nikki looked down at the floor again. A tear dripped down her nose, hung for a moment, and she shook her head sharply, flinging it away.
“Okay. Tell me what happened on Saturday night. Did you go to your uncle’s?”
“Yes.” Defiant.
“How did you get there?”
“By boat.”
“Why?”
“I went there to get something of ours.”
“Something that belonged to you and Daria?”
“Uh huh.”
“You went there to steal?”
“Not to steal.”
“Then why?”
“I went to get something.”
“What?”
“None of your business. I’m being civil. I just won’t answer that, okay?”
Nina paused, then went into her standard explanation about attorney-client privilege but Nikki just shook her head, so Nina called upon the same god of patience she called on in her recent dealings with Bob. “Did you take anything?”
“I’m not telling.”
“If I’m going to be your attorney, you need to trust me and tell me the truth.”
“Are you going to represent me?” Nikki said. “You haven’t said one way or the other.”
“You sure need help. I’m here to help today, but we don’t have an arrangement after that.”
“I sure do need help. I’m not arguing about that.”
“I have to talk to your mother about money.”
“She doesn’t have any. So that lets you out, huh?” Nikki hugged herself.
“It may,” Nina said. “I work alone, Nikki. I have a little office on Lake Tahoe Boulevard and I don’t come from a wealthy family either. I have to take care of Bob. It’s not just getting paid for your case that matters to me. It’s that your case might take up a lot of my work hours for a long time to come.”
Nikki’s face worked. Nina could see she wanted to ask Nina to take the case anyway, but she didn’t. “I’ll trust you when you show me I can trust you. I don’t exactly know a lot of adults worth trusting.”
Nina thought of Daria, of Nikki’s father who had abandoned her, of the poverty of Nikki’s home, and of a girl she had known a long time ago and decided not to press the point. “Okay. Go on with the story.”
“Uncle Bill was home. I watched from the bushes by the pool. He was in his study. The front doorbell rang and he went to answer it.”
“Did you go into the study?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I said. I did my thing and went home.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Nikki?”
“I can’t elaborate on that,” Nikki said with exaggerated care.
Nina thought, if she won’t cooperate, I ought to leave. She took a moment to study the girl, her shabby clothes, the overall air of neglect, the proud angle of her chin, the sad droop of her hair, trying to make up her mind whether she should shoulder her bag and say good-bye and walk out of this young delinquent’s life forever.
Aware of the scrutiny, Nikki veiled her eyes with hair, as if she was expecting Nina to leave and protecting herself in advance. Her hands lay quietly on her legs, the knuckles large and the fingers long and thin.
Bob had spent a good part of his life not knowing where his father was, too. She wondered if he and Nikki ever talked about that. She wondered if Bob was her only friend.
“Nikki?” she said.
The girl looked up with eyes empty of hope. Nina found herself wincing. She knew that expression.
“Did you kill your uncle?” According to her law professors, she wasn’t supposed to ask that. It was the perverted courtesy of the defense attorney—don’t ask so your client won’t have to lie to you. Don’t ask because if the rare client admits guilt, you’ve lost all sorts of trial options. But she often asked anyway, and she always got something from the answer that shaped her defense.
“I didn’t do it.”
“Do you have an idea who might have killed him?”
Had Nikki started at that question? “No,” she said. She was lying.
“When’s the last time before Saturday that you saw your uncle?”
“A long time. Years? We used to go over there when I was little.”
Nina couldn’t read the look on her face, but thought it might be nostalgia.
“Then we didn’t anymore. He called us trailer trash once,” she continued. “I heard him say it, even though he didn’t know I was listening. We didn’t want to know him either. Aunt Beth came over sometimes when he was out of town and brought Chris. Neither of us had brothers and sisters, so—when we were little I pretended Chris was my brother. Then when Chris went to private high school down in LA, we didn’t see him either.” Clearly, this had been a blow. “I tried writing to him a few times, but I quit doing that a while back.”
“Why?” Nina said.
“Oh, it wasn’t that Chris was a snob like Uncle Bill. It’s just—I changed too. We were nearly three years apart in age and I didn’t feel like I could live up to him. I’ve been busy with my downhill spiral.” She smiled. “Band name. Downhill Spiral.”
“Were you ever in your uncle’s home?”
“Sure. When I was little. He had these really violent paintings, and always had sharp things around. He had a set of medical instruments from the sixteenth century or something. And of course, the famous sword. Some samurai owned it in ancient history. Daria told me this morning—she read it in the paper, that he was killed with that thing. He used to have a whole collection of swords. He had this one with a silver handle—no, I guess he said it was made of nickel or something like that—anyway, it had a carved eagle head on the handle. Another one he called a Japanese naval dagger— that had a kind of cut down the blade he called a blood groove. Gross. He had a bunch of these evil-looking things hanging on the wall. Aunt Beth hated them, so about five or six years ago he got rid of all of them except the samurai sword. That one he kept. Turns out, that wasn’t such a brilliant idea, was it?”
“A strange collection. Sounds like those weapons fascinated you as much as they must have fascinated your uncle.”
“Yeah, well, I still didn’t use that sword to kill him. Believe it or not. Your choice.”
“Okay,” Nina said. “This is important, Nikki. Before you said anything to the police, did you understand that you had a right to an attorney?”
“They read me my rights, uh huh. Right after they looked at their report. I think they came to tell Daria about the mur—the thing with Uncle Bill—and I fit some description they already had, ’cause man, they stared at me like they were starved and I was this juicy Big Mac.”
“Your mother was present, right?”
“You might call it that. She was standing right there.”
Nina rested her head on her hand for a moment, thinking.
Nikki watched her. “Bob kept saying, shut up till I get my mom. Just shut up. I finally did. I didn’t say much. But just my luck, someone saw me there that night. That’s really bad, isn’t it?” she asked. “What will they do to me?”
“Well, you have many rights protecting you as a juvenile. We’re about to go and see a very decent judge named Harold Vasquez. He’ll determine whether you have to stay in custody. After that, whether or not you’re allowed to go home, there may be another hearing to determine if you will be declared a ward of the juvenile court, or possibly”—she hesitated—“possibly be shunted into the adult criminal system.”